8 Ancient Writing Systems That Haven't Been Deciphered Yet The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for more than 500 years, with more than a thousand settlements sprawling across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography—and a script no one has been able to understand. Over at Nature, Andrew Robinson looks at the reasons why the Indus Valley script has been so difficult to crack, and details some recent attempts to decipher it. Since we don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta stone, scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's "logo-syllabic" script like Sumerian cuneiform or Mayan glyphs. One team has created the first publicly available, electronic corpus of Indus texts. The Indus Valley script is far from the only one to remain mysterious. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Langues en Suisse La question des langues en Suisse est une composante culturelle et politique centrale de la Suisse. L'allemand (le suisse-allemand est le dialecte généralement utilisé), le français, l'italien et le romanche sont les quatre langues nationales de la Suisse[4] ; les trois premières étant en usage officiel pour les rapports à la Confédération. Les cantons déterminent leurs langues officielles en veillant à la répartition territoriale traditionnelle des langues et en prenant en considération les minorités linguistiques autochtones[5]. Le territoire suisse comprend quatre zones linguistiques dont la langue majoritaire détermine la langue en usage. La Constitution fédérale fixe quatre principes : l'égalité des langues, la liberté des citoyens en matière de langue, la territorialité des langues et la protection des langues minoritaires. En vertu du principe de territorialité, les frontières linguistiques sont fixées par les cantons, parmi lesquels plusieurs sont plurilingues. Du Ier siècle av.
Linguistic Family Tree 552K 18.4KShare337 When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Also worth checking out is the page before the tree, where she gives a comparison chart of words in the Nordic languages, and illustrates what an outlier Finnish is with the concept of “meow.” You can order a poster version here. October 23, 2014 - 5:00pm ©2016 Mental Floss, Inc.
Future - The secret “anti-languages” you’re not supposed to know Could you erectify a luxurimole flackoblots? Have you hidden your chocolate cake from Penelope? Or maybe you’re just going to vada the bona omi? If you understand any of these sentences, you speak an English “anti-language”. Since at least Tudor times, secret argots have been used in the underworld of prisoners, escaped slaves and criminal gangs as a way of confusing and befuddling the authorities. Thieves’ Cant, Polari, and Gobbledygook (yes, it’s a real form of slang) are just a few of the examples from the past – but anti-languages are mercurial beasts that are forever evolving into new and more vibrant forms. A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. One of the first detailed records of an anti-language comes from a 16th Century magistrate called Thomas Harman. Byng we to Rome vyle to nyp a bounge, so shall we have lower for the bowsing ken – Thieves’ Cant As Green points out, many slang words concern our basest preoccupations.
Serbo-croate Zones où les dénominations politiques de la langue serbo-croate ou BCMS sont utilisées par la majorité absolue ou relative de la population (données de 2006) « Serbo-croate » était la dénomination officielle dans l’ancienne Yougoslavie, utilisée aussi en linguistique, d’une langue slave du groupe des langues slaves méridionales, parlée à la fois par les Serbes, les Croates, les Bosniaques et les Monténégrins. D’autres dénominations officiellement acceptées pour cette langue étaient « croato-serbe », « croate ou serbe » et « serbe ou croate »[1]. Déjà à l’époque de la Yougoslavie communiste, « on parlait de variantes occidentale et orientale, et même déjà de ”pratiques linguistiques standard” bosno-herzégovinienne et monténégrine »[5]. Les locuteurs de cette langue ne l’appelaient pas couramment « serbo-croate », terme livresque et scientifique, mais, selon leur appartenance nationale, « serbe », respectivement « croate »[6]. Situation actuelle[modifier | modifier le code]
23 maps and charts on language by Dylan Matthews on April 15, 2015 "The limits of my language," the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once posited, "mean the limits of my world." Explaining everything within the limits of the world is probably too ambitious a goal for a list like this. But here are 23 maps and charts that can hopefully illuminate small aspects of how we manage to communicate with one another. The basics Indo-European language rootsMinna Sundberg, a Finnish-Swedish comic artist, created this beautiful tree to illustrate both the relationships between European and central Asian languages generally, as well as a smaller but still striking point: Finnish has less in common with, say, Swedish than Persian or Hindi do. Language divides Bilingualism Who in Europe speaks EnglishMany countries have more than one commonly used language, with many residents learning two or more. English American English
Ukindia Learn Sanskrit Lesson 1 Paperhelp to help you write papers Lesson 2 ..Home....Asian Books..Sanskrit lessons ( external)..Tamil.Gujarati. Punjabi. Hindi.Urdu.SanskritArabic.Greek.English. If you have enjoyed doing these lessons and would like to help develop the web site further you might consider a small donation of £3 or $5 . Sanskrit is one of the world's most ancient languages and is derived from the same proto mother language as Latin and Greek so many of the words are common. Many ancient Indian texts on Science and Mathematics were written in Sanskrit. To revise the Sanskrit/Hindi script click here. These are a few words in Sanskrit , we will in future often omit the half accent mark in the first word name and the full (two dots) one in the second word balAE . and here are some phrases using these words. The above phrases read : Bal patthti . Here is the script .Make sure you know it by heart . Please read the very helpful comments by Paul Newman below I think consistency is of the greatest importance.
Ranked: The 100 Most Spoken Languages Worldwide Ranked: The 100 Most Spoken Languages Worldwide Even though you’re reading this article in English, there’s a good chance it might not be your mother tongue. Of the billion-strong English speakers in the world, only 33% consider it their native language. The popularity of a language depends greatly on utility and geographic location. Today’s detailed visualization from WordTips illustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from. How Do You Define A Language? The data comes from the 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population, detailing approximately 7,111 living languages in existence today. The definitions of languages are often dynamic, blurring the lines around a singular understanding of what makes a language: Here are the language origins of the 100 most spoken languages: Indo-European languages have the widest spread worldwide.
Why is English so weirdly different from other langu... English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. More weirdness? Why is our language so eccentric? English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English.